Brian Malow and I talked yesterday about some of my favorite things on the latest episode of Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour–including the evolution odometer. You can watch it on Youtube, or you can head over to Dr. Kiki’s Science Hour site to download the video or audio. (The Skype goes berserk briefly, but we get back on track.)
Originally published April 1, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
I went recently to San Francisco to give a talk to a conference of scientists. The scientists were experts in gathering together mountains of biological data — genome sequences, results of experiments and clinical trials — and figuring out how to make them useful: turning them into new diagnostic tests, for example, or a drug for cancer. The invitation was an honor, but a nerve-wracking one. As a journalist, I had no genome scan to offer the audience.
I’m a big fan of Xtranormal movies. And I write, among other things, about big debates in evolutionary biology. So this creation, from Jon Wilkins, a biologist at the Santa Fe Institute, is the essence of awesomesauce.
Originally published March 30, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
The Quarterly Review of Biology delivers a rave for The Tangled Bank: An Introduction to Evolution. Daniel McShea of Duke University writes:
This is the first textbook I have seen by a professional science writer. If this is a sort of experiment in textbook publishing, it is a spectacularly successful one…The result is an introduction to the field that is not only accurate and up to date, but — of course — well written. How important is the prose in a textbook? For students, lively versus leaden, or clear versus cryptic, can be the difference between understanding and not, between being turned on to a field and being turned off. For what it is worth, I solicited help for this review from a biologically inclined high school student, who read a few chapters and reported it to be both clear and engaging….In summary, this is an excellent textbook, one that ought to be — and will be, I predict — widely adopted.
Originally published March 30, 2011. Copyright 2011 Carl Zimmer.
Christof Koch is one of the world’s leading experts on consciousness. A longtime professor at Caltech, he’s just become the chief scientific officer at the Allen Brain Institute, an innovative research center that was funded with $100 million from Microsoft’s Paul Allen. The institute has spent the past eight years building remarkably detailed, three-dimensional atlases of mouse brains. Now, as Koch explains to Nature, he will use those atlases to launch an ambitious new project: